Zip it.

A good designer or bartender knows when to zip it versus when to put forth. That is to say, part of being professional in any vocation is being gracious — having a sense of timing and appropriateness.

An example (not from) from design practice

In this final installment of my “Design Wisdom” series, I’m going to invert the rules and not conclude with a design example from my past, but rather start with a story. About a year ago I was sitting at the bar of a local restaurant with a former client, now close friend. We were reminiscing about the contractor we had worked with. We had both been amazed with how friendly and gracious he had been throughout the job, even when difficulties surfaced. A short while later as we engaged the bartender in casual conversation, the seed for the “Design Wisdom” series was planted. It struck me that, in many ways, the skills of a really good bartender could illustrate what it takes to be a top tier practitioner in almost any profession.

Nine lessons from the bar

1. Make your clients feel welcomeClients should feel welcome, secure, and relaxed in your care. You should view them, and encourage them to view you, as collaborators in artful exchange. The overall focus is to make clients feel as if they are interesting, trusted friends – not unwelcome strangers.

2. Provide good serviceYou may have just unleashed a new design or product that has new clients queued up three deep at your front door, but don’t be fooled. The backbone of your business is service. The art of providing excellent service to each client is your best engine for generating repeat customers. And a repeat customer, particularly a raving fan, is far more valuable to you than someone who disappears, disappointed after their first transaction. Treat your clients well – hopefully they will become regulars or referral sources.

3. Be observant, attentive and fairEvery client, new or old, is entrusting you, as the professional, with creating a good experience for them. Learn to read people and remember them. Take cues from your clients to anticipate what products and services might be of interest to them. Don’t show favoritism to some clients at the expense of others. No one wants to feel second rate.

4. Keep a sense of humorEveryone has bad days, both you and your clients. To be successful you need to keep a good attitude. Yes, there are some really annoying clients out there, but no matter how badly your day is going, treat every client with respect. Every professional needs a good sense of humor – as a means of self-preservation and to deflect potentially difficult situations.

5. Keep yourself busy and things fresh
There’s always something to be done. When business is slow, it’s time to re-evaluate and refresh. Check your inventory of resources. Add something to attract new clients or add value for existing ones. From the bartender’s adage: “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean” comes one for the designer: “if you have time to wait, you have time to create”.

6. Be helpful and knowledgeableObviously, one of the reasons clients come to professionals is to benefit from their knowledge and expertise. While many clients may have some degree of curiosity about your craft, in most cases they haven’t shown up on your doorstep for an education. Demonstrate your knowledge in producing artful results; don’t flaunt it for sake of feeding your ego.

7. Be engaged and have fun

When someone is having fun and is engaged in what they are doing, it shows. And it’s inviting and encouraging for others. There are always aspects of any craft that aren’t fun, but putting yourself wholly into the task and seeking out the pockets of pleasure along the way, make it more pleasant for everyone. Think of it as being able to care with flair.

8. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver

There is something worse than saying “no” right upfront to a client. Its saying “yes” followed by “no”. To promise and then deny, not only speaks of failure to manage expectations of your client, it also communicates that you are neither trustworthy nor competent. Be in tune and upfront about your capabilities.

9. Zip it!

Your clients have come to you to have a service provided, not to hear about the details of your personal life. If they ask for your opinion of last night’s game, that’s fine. But otherwise don’t assume that they want to be entertained by your personal gossip, impressed with your erudition, or burdened with your tales of annoying clients. Sometimes your role is best as a silent movie.

Yet there is a difference

In the art of service, there is one aspect which other professionals have over a bartender. For a designer, it’s still legal to discuss business with a client over a drink – and even declare it as a business expense.

Cheers for a Happy New Year – 2014!

Regardless of what brought a client to your doorstep, what will most likely turn them into a raving fan is how well you conduct your practice with skill and grace.

Remember, Zip it.

Ed Barnhart, principal; Always by Design

*The banner graphic features the letter Z, cropped by a square to its unique alphabetic essence, utilizing the colors Zaffe and Zomp, and a photo Zeroing in on a friendly bartender with clients.

Yearning isn’t enough.

Yearning for the perfect design opportunity is like waiting for the perfect lover.

A college education opens worlds of possibilities and inspires a yearning for realizing the potential of one’s chosen medium. But yearning isn’t enough. You need to find ways to make it happen.

How does opportunity happen?

Think of some of the seminal buildings of 20th Century architecture:
— Saynatsalo Town Hall by Alvar Alto
— Church on the Water by Tadao Ando
— Chapel and Convent of the Capuchinas by Luis Barragan
— Walt Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry
— Chapel of Saint Ignatius by Steven Holl
— Kimbell Art Museum by Louis I. Kahn
— Chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut by Le Corbusier
— Douglas House by Richard Meier
— Sidney Opera House by Jorn Utzon
— American Folk Art Museum by Tod Williams and Billie Tsein
— Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright
— Val Thermal Baths by Peter Zumthor

Do you think the respective clients of the projects above were just sitting there awaiting those particular buildings to arrive? Absolutely not! Take Disney Hall for example. Several years ago I took the architectural audio tour of the building. The recording included architect Frank Gehry relating conversations he’d had with the patron Lillian Disney. At the outset of the project she described how she and Walt were enchanted by masonry castles of Europe, encumbered with climbing vines. She asked Frank Gehry to capture that spirit. There was assuredly no mention of curving stainless steel panels! And yet, she was presumably enchanted by the final built concert hall – with nary a vine or castle-like feature.

The point is, with rare exception does one encounter a patron who shares your yearnings / aspirations. Your job therefore doesn’t end with your being able to imagine a fabulous new world. You need to educate and excite others to join the expedition. And ideally, they are enlisting you to join on their own expedition simultaneously in the project. The best projects are those where client and architects are both realizing their own goals alongside others and finding themselves in a landscape of realization beyond their own ideas.

Realizing good design

To me, the phrase “realizing good design” is rather a double entendre. The first meaning is “becoming aware”, learning to understand and appreciate what good design is – like becoming a detective or connoisseur. The second meaning is “making it happen”. Our education and apprenticeship aim primarily at instilling mastery in the first arena. But it is unquestionably a mastery of the second arena which enables our success in practice.

How to make it happen

How do we as designers “make it happen”? Unfortunately there isn’t a simple answer. It really comes down to learning what your own strengths are and how to use them effectively with others. And yet there are some general truisms, some of which have been touched upon earlier in the “Wisdom” series. For instance, having and displaying passion goes a long way. Passion tends to be contagious. Also, taking risks, or “having skin in the game” facilitates people believing in you and taking a risk with you – not having them feel like you’re asking them to assume all of the risks alone.

Most often though, making it happen involves your going the extra mile. This is where yearning is needed as a start. Yearning is what gets you to aspire to more than the client envisions or is asking for. The yearning is what drives you to come up with that idea that no one else has seen or even looked for. Harness that yearning to get yourself to find ways to make things happen – rather than waiting for people to realize the possibilities which you have to offer.

An example from design practice

Early in my career as an architect, my boss “handed off” an interior design project to me for a small town drugstore. Everyone, the client and my boss alike, looked at the project as “routine” without much room for creative input. The functional layout, largely predetermined by operational considerations for staffing efficiencies, resulted in the customer service pharmacy counter being positioned in the rear, as is often the case. The shelving and displays between the entrance and the counter, while critical for merchandizing, felt to be at odds with customer service in the rear.

Analyzing the problem I yearned for there to be some synergy, rather than conflict, between the merchandizing and customer service needs. I recalled the radial geometries of the stacks employed by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto in several of his libraries. Ultimately I was able to produce a design using radial display shelving (and accompanying radial overhead lighting) which resulted in a more inviting merchandizing environment and an emphasizing of the pharmacy counter. The “surprises” created between the interactions of the rectangular building shell and the radial interior fit-out enabled a richness of spaces for display, customer services and seating. The results exceeded everyone’s expectations.

Use a yearning for better design to serve as your springboard to exceed what’s expected.

Remember, Yearning isn’t enough.

Ed Barnhart, principal; Always by Design

*The banner graphic features the letter Y, cropped by a square to its unique alphabetic essence, utilizing the colors Yellow and Yellow-green, and a photo of a Yearning adventurer jumping to action.

X means here.

While we all have memories and dreams, only here are we fully present.

As an elemental form of signature, an “X” records a human presence. We have only the present and our presence to make a mark, producing work uniquely expressive of our being at this time and place.

Beyond somewhere else

If there were a way of recording how much of the time our thoughts were spent “being somewhere else” versus being engaged and absorbed in what’s at hand, I think most of us would be shocked. I’d venture to say that people’s thoughts are mostly about imagining being elsewhere – in time, location and/or activity. Why is this? There are a lot of reasons, and there are plenty that are not bad.

Indeed, one could argue that creative thought, almost by definition is about imagining something different – a future of sorts. As designers we inherently spend much of our time imagining a better future. Also, as students of history, by interest and necessity alike, we spend time trying to imagine and re-construct things from the past. The skills of “looking forward and looking backward” are indeed well developed for most people. I’d argue that the “muscle” that deserves the most strengthening is being present.

Why be present?

As it goes for a having chance in winning a door prize, you must be present to win. One of the extraordinary aspects of our being human is our skill at adaptation to diverse circumstances. Indeed part of our nature is to seek diverse forms of stimulation and engagement. So, while exercising our imaginations for fantasy or history is essential in providing diversity, it is through real-time, authentic experience that we are truly engaged and find occasion to fully realize our essential nature.

And yet, there are innumerable factors as to why people so often want to do anything but have authentic experience – matters of economy, expedience, fear of engagement, etc. Perhaps that’s the new American dream – being able to win without being present.

What are we to do?

So then, what can and should, we as designers do, facing a public increasingly drawn to fast, cheap and disposable design? Unfortunately, we’re not going to gain any traction on the basis of intellectual or moral arguments. We have to make the benefits of authentic engagement and experience – well, palpable. As designers, we have to take the lead – demonstrating how it’s done, and letting people experience the difference.

Unfortunately too many designers spend too much of their time producing the equivalent of ‘fast-food architecture” – pandering to the quick fix rather than cultivating a nourishing and memorable experience. As architects we must learn how to deliver the most palpable experience we can — engaging the hearts, minds, bodies and souls of others.

An example from design practice

To provide a more concrete example of what I’m touching on with “X means here”, let me use one of my favorite buildings: the library at Exeter Academy in New Hampshire designed by Louis I. Kahn. As it happens, it literally has an “X”.

Before going further, I should point out that, in the best sense, that building indeed was of its time. It pre-dated the internet and personal computers. While the strength of its design endures, allowing it to continue to fulfill its original core purpose, it would not be expressive of what it would mean to design a library today.

Ok, what’s so great about it? Libraries aren’t intrinsically exciting places, inasmuch as they primarily provide storage of and access to books. And yet Kahn rendered the experience of its use as poetic and sublime.

Having essentially eight floors, the library is roughly a cube, enclosing a cubic central atrium space – creating a cubic doughnut if you will. Entering the building one immediately ascends a stair and arrives, a story higher, at the edge of the sky lit central atrium. One immediately feels in the presence of “hallowed space”. A giant “X” hovers over the atrium, formed by giant crossing of concrete beam/walls filtering the natural light from above.

Each of the four perimeter walls of the interior atrium features a single four-story diameter, circular aperture. The apertures reveal the atrium as encircled by the book stacks. Surely we feel ourselves standing at the very core of knowledge. At the outer corners of the square we ascend intimate staircases to access these books, being reminded in so climbing, of the intimate, personal nature of the pursuit of knowledge.

One of Kahn’s more famous concepts was “bringing the book to the light. Accordingly, the perimeter of the building is designed primarily for individual study carrels. Kahn went so far as to give each reader their own sliding wooden shutter to mediate their relationship with outside light and view.

I dare say there isn’t a place in the building that one wouldn’t know where they were – horizontally between orientation of each windowed perimeter façade and atrium core, and vertically, assessing the visible portion of the circular atrium apertures.

Experiencing the building one feels the noblest aspirations of what it means to be human, fully engaging ones senses and intellect.

It is incumbent on designers to produce work of authenticity, expressive of its own time and place, as a means of realizing our fullest nature as humans.

Remember, X means here.

Ed Barnhart, principal; Always by Design

*The banner graphic features the letter X, cropped by a square to its unique alphabetic essence, utilizing the colors Xanadu and onyX, and a photo of EXeter Library atrium.

Woo Wonder.

“Unplugging” is a wonderful tool. Not only does it reconnect you with who you are, it enables you to reconnect with that most basic instinct of childhood: wonder.

Remember wonder?

I’m sure you remember numerous occasions from your childhood where you felt awe or wonder –seeing a meteor shower, hearing a symphony of insects, watching a magician, or looking down at the earth from a plane for the first time. Those experiences of getting goose bumps are truly gifts – which seem to get rarer with age.

As adults, although we might work hard to give others a sense of awe or wonder – as a parent and/or working within the mastery of our respective crafts – we often fail to remember to cultivate wonder for ourselves. And it seems to get harder to do, amidst the business of life and sheer weight of accrued experience. But the path to reconnecting with wonder is probably more accessible than you might think.

Making it happen

Based on my experience, there are three “simple” steps to accessing wonder:

Turn OFF your… Put your agenda and to-do lists on “pause”. Allow yourself to take a break.

LISTEN actively. Observe. Hear. Smell. Taste. … as if for the first time.

Let’s look at each step a little more closely.

First, turn off your…

As anyone with an active brain knows, it takes effort to turn off all of the voices in your own head; things to accomplish, questions to answer, people to meet, etc. However, even amidst an active schedule you can practice the path to recovering wonder in your own life. Give yourself permission – whether it’s for five minutes, an hour or a weekend – to pause. Do it once and wonder why it took you so long to give yourself a break.

Beginner’s mind

Turning off the calendar and commitments isn’t enough. You also need to turn off the critics, analysts and project managers in your head. Actively keep yourself from analyzing and objecting. You’ll have plenty of time to do that later. After all, you’re not free to readily receive if you’re busy screening and filtering. Beginner’s mind is finding the “blank slate” or “empty vessel” again.

Active listening

Now that you’re in a position to truly hear, observe, taste, smell and feel — you’re the new sponge. Just sit back and simply try to fully absorb what’s being offered in your midst. It’s amazing what you hear when you’re actively just listening.

There are numerous rewards for arriving at the point of listening actively. The two I find most rewarding are: being surprised (pleasantly) and feeling wonder. It’s a true gift to tap into these feelings again.

Cultivating a “beginners mind” while taking a walk, or seeing an exhibition, or attending a conference has the effect of turning most everything into a “sleeper hit”. Doing so enables one to experience each speaker or event as being more informative, fresh and enjoyable – and yes, even the source of wonder.

An example from design practice

Earlier in this year I attended a regional TEDx conference. I didn’t go with any particular expectations. But I did arrive to the conference with intentions, or an intention. I did my best to arrive as an empty vessel.

While I felt most speakers to be inspiring, one was the true stand-out for me. Pam Dorr was billed as a social entrepreneur, introducing sustainable housing development and positive change for over 400 families a year in the severely impoverished county of Hale, Alabama. Barely into her talk, even before describing her work in the rural south, I became transfixed by the explanation of how she got there.

The journey she described, struck me as beginning with self-empowerment in her native community near San Francisco. The seed of her journey was in making a home for herself. I mean, literally.

She showed a “before” picture of a derelict interior space – a ruin, the prototypical definition of a “tear-down”. Next she showed the “after”. I felt like I was seeing the most beautiful space I’d ever seen. Why? It was authentic. She had made it herself, for herself – almost entirely from salvaged scraps. It wasn’t idealized or romanticized or made for how others might react. It was made for her, by her. In fact it was rather elemental — clean, filled with sun, free of clutter and intervening structure, with a sense of an overarching protective roof. It wasn’t about ideal proportions, fetishized details or expensive materials. It was space and light and protection. Above all, it was accomplishment – perhaps her first realization of owning “can do” for herself.

The rest of her talk was how she blossomed… taking what she learned to do for herself, and expanding upon it to help another individual and another… and now helping to lead an entire community towards nourishing and sustaining itself. Ironically, for those coming with expectations of what they were going to hear, that was the delivery. For those of us “unprepared”, Pam Dorr’s delivery was goosebumps — of authenticity, self-discovery and altruism.

Allow yourself permission to take a break from what you “should be doing” and take in a healthy dose of unfiltered raw data from your senses. It just might spark wonder.

Remember, Woo Wonder.

Ed Barnhart, principal; Always by Design

*The banner graphic features the letter W, cropped by a square to its unique alphabetic essence, utilizing the colors Wine and Wheat, and a photo of Pan Dorr doing Wonders at PieLab.

Value others’ space.

Architects’ value in shaping space shouldn’t end with the physical environment.

As designers our work is in creating meaningful relationships among things and people. An important tool for doing this is practicing with grace. That means shaping a different kind of space.

It’s all about relationships

As designers, we’re all familiar with ideas of composition and finding balance – creating relationships among lines, shapes, colors, surfaces and materials to achieve elegant results. First and foremost we are shapers of visual and physical space. But what lies beyond the mastery of form-making?

Our work is ultimately about people. Architecture finds its purpose and identity in what it means to people. In other words, beyond mere form-making,designing is fundamentally about structuring relationships with people and for people.

These relationships, personal relationships, are of two types. One is found in the process of creating: the relationships along project participants, from client to contractor and everyone in between. The other is the unique relationship (meaning or bond) a user finds in experiencing the completed work – how it connects with their own life. A design tool (not taught in design school), which addresses both, is learning how to practice with grace to achieve positive relationships.

Defining grace

What is grace? It is the form or elegance of how we practice our art, and shoulder difficulties.What is graceful? A balanced resolution of forces, evidenced in elegant or beautiful forms or actions.What does it mean to be gracious?Graciousness is about valuing others – not assuming that you know their situation, or that your own perceptions or preferences trump theirs. It’s about giving space.

If I had to sum it all up, I’d say grace is: elegant balancing among others.

First rule of composition

If you go back to Composition 101, the first rule is that the spaces are as important as the figures. They help define one another. In achieving balance then, grace is found in space-making.

In terms of shaping personal relationships, this form of space-making, is largely about allowing time. Time-allowing enables participants in a creative process to:
— Assess and appreciate others’ viewpoints
— Gain fresh perspective and clarity
— Find common ground and create alternatives

Practicing with grace

Grace is a calmness granted — enabling individuals to see below a discordant surface, to a deeper reservoir of shared purpose.

In other words, practicing with grace allows participants to find their bearings, assess options and shape their relationship to an experience or environment. If I am graceful with myself, I am allowing myself to take the time to understand and reconcile what I am experiencing. In being graceful to others, I am granting them time to take stock and find their own balance in a situation.

Working with your team

Let’s talk about the role of grace among participants in the creative process. Rather than pushing your agenda on a given project, make space to listen and find perspective. Grant others the respect that their ideas are as valid as your own. There’s great value in taking the time to understand your client’s questions and educating them, to help them understand what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it. In fact, learn to understand the goals of everyone on your team.

Practicing grace leads to a stronger team and results in work which is also stronger. Not only that, but the results are held more dearly – participants are far more invested in owning the results. Remember, true graciousness demands that you have time for others. You always have time. You grant it to others without obligation. That is the gift of being gracious.

Grace for users

How can we offer grace to others who experience our completed work? If I were to personify design work, I’d say, your work should allow the user to enter into conversation with it. Carrying that further, your work shouldn’t pretend to know everything and have the last word. As I previously articulated in “L is for Leave Leavening”, your work should be more of a lattice – accepting others elaborations – than a brick wall, affording no further passage.

In being gracious to users of our work, we grant them the means, the emotional and intellectual space to apprehend, appreciate and find themselves in the spaces and objects we have created.

An example from design practice

It is the fourth dimension that gets everyone into trouble most often. What am I talking about? Time. More than anything else, when I look back at a situation gone wrong, the source of the problem stemmed from time – more specifically, from time not taken.

One version of not taking time is: “I’ve got to get this (whatever) finished in time for a deadline.” This means getting to a result prematurely – a shortcutting of the necessary preparations. OK, you make your deadline, and the next one, and the next one and get to a completed building. Then the client or user walks into it and says: Huh? This isn’t what I: a) wanted, b)expected, and/or c)was told. Oops.

What happened? You didn’t provide space in the process. You didn’t allow for a graceful unfoldment of communication, deliberation and rooting of ideas. The consequence for those who don’t manage the relationships along the way with grace is that they find themselves picking up the pieces of the resulting wreckage afterword.

As we practice with grace, we grant for ourselves and others’ the space to reconcile their experiences and achieve elegance in what they do.

Remember, Value others’ space.

Ed Barnhart, principal; Always by Design

*The banner graphic features the letter V, cropped by a square to its unique alphabetic essence, utilizing the colors Viridian and Violet, and a photo of Very graceful ballerinas.

Take Leave.

Anyone who has taken “Graphic Design 101” has heard the advice for when stuck on a composition problem: “Turn it upside down and get a fresh perspective”. That also applies on a larger scale.

On being tenacious

Design practice on the whole is not for the faint of heart. It takes a fair degree of confidence and persistence to weather the forces of naysayers, technical setbacks and politics of practice. Accordingly, design fields tend to attract people who expect to be tenacious and persevere. When the going gets tough, designers don’t tend to jump ship in the hope of having an easier go of it elsewhere. Sure, having an easier go of it would be fine, but not at the expense of a design vision!

So, what do you need to do when you get stuck? My advice: Don’t abandon your idea — just give it a rest! After all, we’ve all experienced getting stuck on something, then taking a break – be it a walk around the block or a good night’s sleep – and finding ourselves renewed and more capable of moving an idea forward.

Taking leave…

The message here isn’t to take a nap or turn on the TV at the first onset of difficulty. That message would be wrong on two levels. First, “taking leave” shouldn’t necessarily be construed as “tuning out”. Secondly, “taking leave” can and should be as much a proactive, preventative practice as a reactive, curative one.

Let’s take a minute and define “taking leave”. Taking leave is simply, making a change in your environment, or focus. So, using television as a metaphor, while you literally could leave or turn off the TV, simply changing the channel may well be enough to jog your experience.

Tuning in or tuning out

We all have our ways of recharging our batteries. It may be as simple as picking up the phone to talk with a friend or relative. Or it might be going for a walk or run. The architect Le Corbusier was famous for doing oil painting in the morning in one studio and conducting his architectural practice from another studio in the afternoon. Inventor Thomas Edison on the other hand was famous for taking short “catnaps” whenever he felt the need – right on a nearby lab bench! You only have to discover for yourself what works for you.

Preventative practice

The best advice for “taking leave” is to do it before you find yourself at a seeming dead end. If you’re like many, you tend to say: “when I finish XYZ, then I’ll give myself a break”. Forcing oneself to reach completion before allowing “the luxury” of taking leave is often how they get into trouble. I think the artist Picasso had it right. He claimed that he never finished a painting at the end of the day, but rather left something undone so that he knew where to start the next day.

When practicing “preventatively”, schedule breaks ahead of your work. For large breaks such as a trip, book it six months in advance, while your calendar is still relatively empty. When the time arrives, and you inevitably feel totally in the middle of your project, you can shrug and say “what can I do now but go”? You reluctantly pull yourself away. Invariably, when you return your energy level is higher – and you’ve probably got a few new ideas to boot.

An example from design practice

When in my third year of design studio in college, I was tackling the largest design problem that I’d been assigned up to that point – design of an entire city block in Center City Philadelphia for a high density, mixed-use development with a hotel and single-family residences. Early on in the project I got stuck on trying to find an overall building massing that I felt comfortable with. At the time it felt like I was trying to solve a huge simultaneous math equation – where variables included: neighborhood view corridors, vehicular access and parking, separating public vs. private domains, respecting zoning height and setback constraints, etc.

Weeks went by with my struggling with small site models. I wasn’t getting anywhere. It must have been in about the third week that professor threw me the life-saver I needed. He said: “Instead of focusing on what you don’t know, why don’t you start focusing on what you do know”. This was the “taking leave” I needed. All of a sudden I felt flush with ideas. Suddenly I was focused on making places where people would want to live, as opposed to what was “allowed” by external forces on the project. With a clear idea gained as to what was desirable, working within the constraints became easy.

Respect context.

As a designer, you don’t work in a vacuum. It’s important to respect your context.

Just as it is said that “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it”, those who are arrogant enough to disrespect their surroundings are doomed to suffer the consequences.

Respect, not fear

I’m guessing I’m not alone in having been confused as a child by religious teachings that stressed the need to fear God. It probably wasn’t until about college age that I learned that fear in this case had two meanings – neither one being about hiding from a vengeful superpower. The first was to have reverential awe, that is to say, an overwhelming deep feeling of respectfulness. The second was in realizing the (negative) consequences for failing to understand and respect [someone or something]. Ultimately the root meaning of fear has to do with acknowledging respect.

A broader definition

If you look up the definition of “respect” in the dictionary and do a speed reading, rather than parsing out the shadings of meanings, you get something like: …a relation or reference…sense of worth…deference to a person or position.

One of the consequences (and benefits) of growing older and having more years of design practice under ones belt, is the enlarging of one’s sphere of reference or relations. With that comes humility as one becomes more deeply aware of the amazing achievements of earlier figures in history. Whether you are learning more about your favorite architect or a former statesman in history, often what emerges is reverential awe. With knowledge of history comes appreciation and respect. In my view, the accomplishments of historical figures are mostly about working the warp and weft of their contexts into different meanings, not ignoring them. They made a difference in respecting their context and working to transform it.

Designers aren’t superheroes

Over the years I’ve served as a design critic on a wide range of college architectural studio juries. One of the recurring themes, from my perspective, is a desire [among students] for shear transcendence, rather than transformation of a place. (Or, put another way: Revolution before evolution.) First and foremost, most students are very angry with gravity. “Oh what a bother” they say! (In my days as a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute I heard many a peer invoke the use of “Rensselonium, a fictitious element capable of spanning infinite distances with infinitesimal thickness”. After all, if you don’t have a cantilever that spans at least half a city block, who would ever notice your design? Even materials can be a bother, with students focusing solely on form – at the expense of everything else.

Just as it is said that “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it”, those who are arrogant enough to ignore their surroundings are doomed to suffer the consequences. Yes, even if you make your building all white to transcend nature, it’s still going to get dirty after all. Recognize and respect nature rather than fighting it and having “to fear” with respect to consequences.

What I’ve come to realize is that success as a designer (and human being) comes in respect, rather than transcendence of our context. Taking this to a more philosophical level I would subscribe to the idea that transcendence is achieved as a result of embodying (respecting) our nature (context) to its fullest.

An example from design practice

The earliest paying commission I ever had was design-build of a dollhouse. (I’m guessing I was about thirteen years old at the time.) All told, within the course of about a year, I was commissioned to design and build three of these structures – each about 2-1/2 feet tall and 3 feet long, open in the back and with a hinged roof revealing an attic.

I got my first power tool for the job, a single-speed jigsaw. Working with both a jigsaw and plywood for the first time I got an expedient lesson as to the “nature” of each. The jigsaw seemed to have a mind of its own and was often at war with the plywood, tearing large splinters of face veneer loose, spoiling any chance of a clean finished wall or floor surface in the model. After trying to will the saw and wood into obedience (and failing repeatedly) I finally came to realize that what was needed was understanding and respect for the limitations of both my tools and chosen materials. At that age I was far from understanding the potential for expressing the nature of materials. It was enough to not fight them. Respect has to start somewhere.

As my career evolved I pursued construction experience alongside the study of architectural history and design. As a semi-professional carpenter I helped build a geodesic dome, a boat dock, decks, numerous house renovations, and cabinetry for several residences. I learned my limitations as a novice bricklayer, plumber, electrician, drywaller and painter too. The repeated lesson was: learn to respect the tools of the trade and the nature of the materials you are working with. With respect comes fluency – the ability to discern the flow – and being able to just go with it.

Rather than trying to transcend the context of your design project by ignoring it, learn and respect its nature and use that power as the ultimate transformative force.

Remember, Respect context.

Ed Barnhart, principal; Always by Design

*The banner graphic features the letter R, cropped by a square to its unique alphabetic essence, utilizing the colors Rust and Raspberry, and a photo of woodworker Respecting grain of wood.